Tag Archives: social justice

Hours before I met Ben Passmore for the first time, I’d been informed that it was the first night of Mardis Gras in New Orleans. My partner and I were on tour in the American South and had not made any definitive plans for the space on the map between Atlanta and Houston. A friend of a friend put us in touch, and we gathered in a small group waiting for the Krewe du Vieux parade to start. The night’s theme: “politically incorrect”.

I could hear wooden chips and beads crunching under my shoes as I struggled to distribute the seven jell-o shots I’d just purchased from a nice old lady pushing a cooler through the crowd along the sidewalk. We stood, drinking, smoking, and watched the floats pass: a pair of queens with enormous falsies, an old white man from the ‘NOLA for Bernie Sanders campaign’ wearing a fake indigenous headdress and throwing candy. It was somewhat surreal, somewhat entirely foreseeable.

Mardis Gras continues like clockwork every year, but a lot of New Orleans has changed since Hurricane Katrina. The largest residential building in the city is abandoned. Entire neighbourhoods are boarded up, next to other neighborhoods peppered with colourful and chic low-income housing built with donations from celebrities like Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. In many ways, post-Katrina NOLA became the poster city for explaining concepts like disaster capitalism, neo-liberalism, and gentrification.

It’s hard not to notice elements of this un-done landscape in Passmore’s online comic, D A Y G L O A H O L E, which he worked on for years while living in the city. Characters wander around a mysterious post-civilization wasteland. There are semi-familiar objects everywhere, but ‘civil society’ and all that phrase entails is gone. Washed away. Each new comic extends further into this post-apocalyptic future, and deeper into Passmore’s mind we go.

“Daygloayhole has consistently been too ambitious for my level of talent, but I think that’s what makes it fun. I’m not a huge sci-fi nerd, but what little of it I’ve consumed and enjoyed consistently pairs the recognizable with the fantastically alien.”

Passmore spent several years working on daygloahole, living in New Orleans. Life was a mix of work, going to shows, and fostering a burgeoning indie comics scene through the NOLA zine and comics fair. Of course a city known for its history of parades and grassroots activism will attract its share of artists, hippies, road punks, and anarchists. When I suggested that New Orleans appeared to solve the age-old mystery of where crust punks go to die, he said it was “more to become undead… There’s a lot of lumbering soulessness [here].”

And the anarchists were having a moment. Abandoned buildings were being squatted and used for political organizing or art projects.

The phrase ‘It’s all over’ appears again and again in daygloahole, which was funny because that’s all I could think when I was in New Orleans. And then, it doesn’t seem quite as funny anymore.

“I think that’s something that I enjoyed at first, the culture of collapse in New Orleans, until I really realized the toll Katrina took on people’s minds and lives, and the disparity it underlined.”

That disparity is one drawn clearly around race in New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole, whether we’re talking about segregation of schools and neighborhoods, police violence, or the state prison system. It was only in the last year that New Orleans removed several Confederate Monuments, which Passmore documented for the comics journalism website, The Nib.

The Confederate Monument fights became a flashpoint in the South for confronting fascist and white supremacist forces, who were being emboldened by Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” (a perfect dog-whistle for the South’s “Lost Cause” sentiment, which sticks around like 100% humidity). From inside a jail cell for confronting the KKK at Stone Mountain, to the streets of New Orleans where a masked Mardis Gras parade took to a Confederate statue with paint and sledgehammers, Ben took names, covered it, drew it, and showed the rest of us what was going on.

“I’ve been really excited about doing pieces for the NIB,” Ben says. “It’s good to have to explain your ideas with pictures and words if you’re politically wing-nutty. I assume the majority of the NIB readership is liberal and prolly not very into most of my Anarchist politics.”

“New Orleans created a feeling of urgency about white supremacy as a societal poison that I didn’t feel as much before I moved there.”

“And it for sure burned me out on white people.”

In 2017, Ben Passmore made international news for having his work, a short 16-page comic called “Your Black Friend,” nominated for an Eisner Award. For those of you not in the comics industry: that’s kind of like being nominated for an Academy Award. Needless to say, as an anarchist, but more as a political comic enthusiast, I was pretty stoked about the news.

‘Your Black Friend’ is a comic for that person who wants you to know they’re not a racist. It’s a comic about micro-aggressions, cultural appropriation, and lefty-progressive virtue-signalling. It is a short but poetically full-circle sampling of how annoying, depressing, terrifying, and frustrating it is to share space and community with white people (even those nice ones) in a white supremacist world.

Passmore’s first 20 years were in and around Great Barrington, Massachusetts. “My mom was/is an artist and she encouraged me to draw a lot. I think she would’ve liked me to draw trees… I drew a lot of muscle guys in spandex covered in spikes.”

Ben would eventually go on to art school and major in comics with a minor in illustration.

Passmore seems somewhat surprised that younger people are inspired by his work.

“I get messages from other weird black cartoonists and people that get stuff out of my comics. A couple times people have told me that they’ve been “reading my comics for years” and they’re in their early twenties which is such a crazy thing to be a part of someone’s cultural scenery when they’re turning into an adult.”

There’s a lot being processed in Passmore’s comics, from the low-key racism of his friends, to his Mom voting for Trump, to his own relationships with addiction, depression and impulses to self-harm. Ben has made space for it all, while never taking himself too seriously.

A current project of Passmore’s –not yet released– deals with identity, inspired by the pronounced dysphoria he experienced during the last two years’ living in NOLA. I’m looking forward to seeing that, given the nuance he gives to subjects like blackness and queerness. “I’ve never subscribed to the ‘destroy everything/destroy my body’ that characterizes some queer nihilism. Not because I don’t think that strain has validity, it’s just it feels complicated to be black and to desire physical deconstruction.”

Ad Astra Comix, in cooperation with Zubaan Books has officially opened pre-orders for “Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back!” here in North America. If you have already ordered your copy off our Kickstarter but can’t wait to see what’s in store, here’s a little teaser to keep you going! Below you’ll find an exclusive sneak preview of the beauty and power of ‘Drawing the Line’, which connects issues of gender, sexuality, shade/race, class, and inter-generational dialogue in one exciting volume. In short, we feel that this book includes a little of everything that North American feminism needs: international and intersectional perspectives on the ‘every day’ of womanhood.

Ad Astra Comix and Zubaan Books are pleased to announce a North American edition of the groundbreaking comic title ‘Drawing The Line’. The book is a 162-page anthology of 14 accounts by Indian women of their day-to-day experiences in India, illustrated by the authors. After a successful debut in India, ‘Drawing the Line’ is coming to North America where a whole new audience can glean insight from the diverse perspectives of its contributors.4

Released as part of an ongoing national conversation in India around sexual violence and the experience of women in public spaces, ‘Drawing the Line’ is an anthology of comics that range from comics journalism to autobiography. Though some of the comics address sexual violence, other themes include beauty standards, patriarchal attitudes in the workplace, experiences of sisterhood on public transit and other experiences of womanhood in India.

Although the sexual assault case that sparked this national conversation around gender in India was covered in the western press, that coverage has been heavily skewed. Sexual violence has been portrayed as an Indian problem as though it was not also common in North American society. Rather than allowing western media to speak for Indian women, this title presents the individual, on-the-ground experiences of women in their own words and pictures.

At a time when white feminism is struggling to embrace intersectionality in a meaningful way, titles like ‘Drawing the Line’ offer western feminists an opportunity to engage with the lived experiences of Indian women in other parts of the world. For South Asian women living in the diaspora, ‘Drawing the Line’ represents an opportunity to compare similarities and differences between diasporic life and the experience of women still in India.

Zubaan Books, the title’s Indian publisher, are an independent feminist publishing house based out of New Delhi that has been operating since 2003.

Ad Astra Comix is a Toronto-based comics press specializing in the production and publication of comics and graphic novels that amplify marginalized voices. Founded in 2012, Ad Astra is working on several publishing projects in addition to ‘Drawing the Line’.

This past May, at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (or TCAF), we joined 20,000 other comic and art fans at the Toronto Public Library. Dozens of publishers traded, hundreds of artists talked, and literally thousands of books changed hands… but how many of them were about social issues? Very few. And if that was the case, why? Do people not care about social issues? If they do, which ones to they care about?

What people told us, and how they responded revealed some interesting answers…

The literary fortune telling booth was a a true highlight of the evening, with all kinds of people packing in behind a screen of diaphanous silk to hear Melina and Yasmine prophesize their book-loving prospects with tomes and tarot alike! Some eager fortune-seekers were so taken by the proceedings that they sat in on additional tellings just to take it all in.

Ad Astra Comix contributor and Comic Book Embassy ambassador Sam Noir made an appearance with his newly-crafted “Crack Smokin'” Mayoral action figure! Also to be available in a PG “Publically Inebriated” model… We hope he will be making many more, as it was incredibly popular!

If Mario Kart came to a crashing close when someone stumbled over the controller cords and sent the whole thing into scattered disarray, the circles of conversation that formed in the half-pipe were an ample substitute. Several attendees discovered to their delight that the slick surface of the half-pipe is perfect for group sliding…

All in all it was an exciting night – food was served, perspectives were exchanged and a good time was had by all. If we sold a few comics along the way, well, it’s in the service of expanding the city’s political horizons through the medium of the graphic narrative. A big thank you to the 70+ people that came out to make the event a truly memorable one, and an extra special cheer of appreciation to everyone who poured their energy into putting it all together.

the panel is political.

Ad Astra Comix is a publisher specializing in comic books with social justice themes. We are currently on tour across North America! For workshop requests, interviews, or a sales catalog, please e-mail us at adastracomix@gmail.com

Interested in a particular social issue? We’ll help you find a comic for that!